Scanner / digitization forum ?

On the DPReview Film Forum quite a few of the threads were about scanning or digitization in general. Also these discussions found their way onto the Open, PC, Mac, retouching forums. Often people looking to digitize old negatives aren’t thinking that it’s a “film photography” issue, and so those threads could sometimes be missed. What do people think about having a separate forum on DPRevived to catch everything related to digitising film ?

Photrio forum has a dedicated subforum for scanning and hybrid workflow so it's certainly worth considering. However, they have a much larger membership than this site so I worry that we might be fracturing the community.
Which category do you suggest it goes under? "Miscellaneous" (same as Film) or "photography and techniques"
I'll be happy to support whatever the majority decide.

Me, one of the things I dislike about Photrio is the strict divide of analog and digital processes. I don't think scanning is the work of the devil. I think it'd be best to keep scanning in here for now, and if, by some happy happenstance, traffic in the film area grows, then break it out into a separate group. I can actually think of several sub-groups that would work well, but I respect the fact that DPReview was meant to be primarily a digital site, and that DPRevived is going to be the same. It'd be great to see this place grow into a hub for film conversation and I would think the Powers That Be would be open to a bigger section. First let's see if all the bickering in the beginner's area scares everyone off. :)

Aaron

I suppose I am assuming that there will eventually be the same (or similar) numbers of people using this site as DPR (but as has been pointed out elsewhere, many users of DPR may simply stop using anything when it finally closes). I hadn’t really thought about where would be the best for it - at the moment there seems to be a push to rationalize some of the forums based on numbers of posts (among other things) so Miscellaneous might be best.

I wasn’t thinking so much to separate scanning from film photography (in 2023 almost everyone doing film photography will be scanning the negatives), more as a way for people who want to scan a shoebox full of negatives they’ve just found to ask a question. But I think at the moment the numbers probably wouldn’t support a separate forum.

Maybe there is too little traffic for an own forum. But is Film photography the right place to Scanning / Digitization discussions?

I think scanning is a wider theme than only scanning the negatives. There is also prints and slides to digitize. Digitizing means nowadays not so often work with a scanner than "Camera scanning" and in the future more so. Camera scanning is not scanning at all but Reproduction Photography. If You find a shoebox full of your Grandpa's Kodachromes I'd not recommend you to digitize those with your old-fashioned scanner. Use a modern digital camera with much better DR.

And then there's the digitization of Oil Paintings and Drawings, all Cultural Heritage. No Film Photography, not even scanning.

I was only thinking of scanning / camera copying of negatives and prints. I think photographing paintings / drawings would be a bit of an edge case for such a forum (although DPR had people asking why they can’t get 10,000 dpi copies of their artwork with a scanner, so maybe not so much).

Personally, I think if you find a shoebox of Kodachromes you should either use one of those cheap copying machines, or send them out to a bureau, depending on how good the slides are. Making a decent copy of slides and negatives is as much about experience as equipment (and from what I’ve seen of camera “scanning” even more so).

I think this is an appropriate forum... as to shoot film , well...you have to do something with it once you process it. You have two choices, print from the negative, or scan the negative. Many scanning options but certainly part of the overall process I would think, jim

I agree from the POV of people using film, but on DPR there were lots of people looking for advice on scanning who didn’t really know where to look - or even that there was a film forum. Whether that will happen on here is anyone’s guess - it would depend on Google pointing people to dprevived in the first place for scanning issues.